Tuesday, December 1, 2009

More on ALS...

Indulge me, please, for another post on ALS. My last blog on the subject was about our NC chapter's golf tournament. This is more serious, and I ask that you invest five to ten minutes with the content I'm posting.

Incidence of ALS among soldiers. This horrible disease has a historical connection with baseball heroes Lou Gehrig and Catfish Hunter, but an alarming link has developed with the military.

...and I commend this column to you. Tom Swift of Hendersonville writes for the Asheville Citizen-Times. He is losing his ability to speak, but not his eloquence:

Every three months I go to a clinic in Charlotte that specializes in the diagnosis and treatment of ALS. "Treatment" is an optimistic word, for there is no treatment or cure for ALS at present, only the management of symptoms. At each clinic I take a breathing test to measure my lung functioning. I breathe as long and as hard as I can into a tube that measures me against a standard based upon my age, weight, gender, and so forth. The first couple of times I took the test I exceeded the standard and scored over one hundred percent. During the last two years, my lung function capacity has gradually declined to seventy-six percent. While this is no reason for immediate alarm, it is objective evidence that the disease is robbing me of my health. It is evidence that ALS will eventually kill me.

Your Blogger...

I'm VP of the Sports Group at Capitol Broadcasting Co. My office is in the Durham Bulls Athletic Park - a great place to work. (And wonderfully distracting!)

CBC owns the Bulls, operates four sports-talk radio stations in Raleigh and wralSPORTSfan.com. Our radio brands are The Fan, Buzz Sports Radio, The Ticket and ESPN Deportes. We are a partner with Learfield Sports at Wolfpack Sports Properties, and our TV stations connect viewers with NBC, Fox and ACC sports. Our radio stations are the RDU flagships for NC State, Duke Univ, the NHL Carolina Hurricanes and the Bulls.

We even built a basketball court at our American Tobacco complex in Durham and a play area for grown-ups! There's a brewery in the ballpark, too. It's work. It's play. I can't always tell the difference!?!